Full spoilers follow for Starfleet Academy Episode 5, “Series Acclimation Mil.”
This week's installment of Starfleet Academy makes good on a promise Paramount+ essentially made last summer at San Diego Comic-Con when the streamer released a trailer for the series which seemed to indicate that the mystery of Captain Benjamin Sisko would be addressed. Sisko, of course, was the Starfleet officer and Emissary to the Prophets, played by Avery Brooks for seven seasons on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, who disappeared in the classic series finale "What You Leave Behind," apparently ascending to a higher form of life as one of the other-wordly and god-like Prophets himself.
And now the episode of Starfleet Academy which delves into this topic has been released. In “Series Acclimation Mil,” Kerrice Brooks' Sam -- who is something of an emissary herself for her people -- embarks on a mission to learn everything she can about Sisko. Along the way, none other than Cirroc Lofton returns as Jake Sisko, having played Benjamin's son in DS9 all those years ago. And while Brooks does not appear as the long-lost captain, we do hear his voice in the final moments of the episode... and if you look really closely, you can see an image of his face in the clouds in that last shot.
We spoke with showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau about the decision to return to the story of the Siskos, how it was achieved, and more...
The Return of Captain Benjamin Sisko and His Son Jake
IGN: At what point did you say, "We want to address the Sisko of it all"?
Noga Landau: I have to say that when I started this job, people from my past, the most random people were emailing me, DMing me and saying, "Hey, congrats. And by the way, when is someone going to do something for Captain Sisko? When is someone going to do something for DS9?" So it felt like the universe was sending us a very clear message.
And then honestly, in the room, we knew we wanted to do a Sam episode, and she's an emissary, and who's the most famous emissary in all of Star Trek? It's Captain Sisko. And our two writers for the episode, Tawny Newsome and Kirsten Beyer, they are walking Trek encyclopedias and their love for DS9 goes so deep. They know it so well. And they came together and we broke the story, we figured out how to write the love letter we wanted, but also really honor Avery Brooks and Cirroc Lofton.
And Cirroc, who is a friend of Tawny, so generously said he would come back and play Jake Sisko again, which was incredible. It was a dream come true to see him on screen again.
Alex Kurtzman: I think the other thing too is that Sam is asking this question, "Okay, I don't know what it means to be an emissary. It's this responsibility where I'm essentially supposed to be a bridge between my species, which I'm not even sure I fully agree with, and then the Federation. And where do I fit in there? What if I don't agree?" And is my job as emissary going to remove my personality from my choice, my own will from the equation? Obviously that mirrors a lot of what Sisko had to go through and the sort of "What am I going to give up for this particular task that I've been given?" So it felt like a very organic connection point.
IGN: What was it like getting the character of Jake and getting Cirroc back on set?
AK: They were very emotional, I think, for everybody. And he was very generous. He was very happy to be there. He really liked the script. He fully understood that it was a love letter, and he's very close with Avery. And so we really looked to Cirroc to make sure that... He was the best we could get, the Avery stamp of approval. And we had reached out to Avery and we didn't hear from him for a while, and so Cirroc ended up being the voice for us. And then by the end, Avery did reach out. And that is his voice you hear at the end of the episode.
It's really him, and it's a spoken word recording that he did himself a while ago that he let us use. And it happened to be ... the message of the episode. It was very strange. So maybe the clouds were watching.
IGN: Did he explain what it was about this particular story that finally made him want to even acknowledge Star Trek? He's been pretty adamant about, "I'm done. I'm out. Don't talk to me about it."
NL: In the way that you leave a love letter for someone expecting for it only to be received, that's really what we did with him. We did not want to ask anything in return. We wanted him to have this and just to receive it and to take it, if he was willing to.
The fact that he then let us use his voice at the very end was so impactful and so emotional. And it would've been enough for him just to watch the episode and enjoy it, but I think we had a joke on set that Cirroc in many ways was our emissary to Avery, and it was simply enough to know that he's out there somewhere in the universe and he knows that we made this episode for him.
Starfleet Academy Episode 5 is available on Paramount+ now.
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